--
Look at Clara, poor child, and her misery! My pride, I know, would never
have let me fall as far as she has done; but oh! I am humiliated to think
that I could have been made to say I would take the first step in that
awful career."
"What career, in God's name?" cries the astonished suitor. "Humiliated,
Ethel? Who's going to humiliate you? I suppose there is no woman in
England who need be humiliated by becoming my wife. I should like to see
the one that I can't pretend to--or to royal blood if I like: it's not
better than mine. Humiliated, indeed! That is news. Ha! ha! You don't
suppose that your pedigree, which I know all about, and the Newcome
family, with your barber-surgeon to Edward the Confessor, are equal
to----"
"To yours? No. It is not very long that I have learned to disbelieve in
that story altogether. I fancy it was an odd whim of my poor father's,
and that our family were quite poor people.
"I knew it," said Lord Farintosh. "Do you suppose there was not plenty of
women to tell it me?"
"It was not because we were poor that I am ashamed," Ethel went on.
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